Ben Santer: Climate Change Responsible for Hotter and Colder Weather

A new study by Ben Santer which claims that climate change is strengthening the heartbeat of the world’s climate, making winters colder and summers warmer.

Climate change strengthens Earth’s ‘heartbeat’ – and that’s bad news

By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer

…

Climate change is much more than rising temperatures and melting ice. In a new study, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and five other organizations show that human action significantly affects the seasonal temperature cycle in the troposphere, or lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere — the layer that we live in where weather occurs.

…

In this new study, scientists examined seasonal temperature cycles in the troposphere and observed the profound impact humans are having on the atmosphere and our seasons. Most notably, the researchers found that because of carbon dioxide emissions, Earth’s seasonal “heartbeat,” or the contrast between hot summers and cold winters, is becoming stronger.

…

“Our results suggest that attribution studies with the changing seasonal cycle provide powerful and novel evidence for a significant human effect on Earth’s climate,” Benjamin Santer, LLNL climate scientist and lead author on the new work, said in a statement.

We provide scientific evidence that a human-caused signal in the seasonal cycle of tropospheric temperature has emerged from the background noise of natural variability. Satellite data and the anthropogenic “fingerprint” predicted by climate models show common large-scale changes in geographical patterns of seasonal cycle amplitude. These common features include increases in amplitude at mid-latitudes in both hemispheres, amplitude decreases at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, and small changes in the tropics. Simple physical mechanisms explain these features. The model fingerprint of seasonal cycle changes is identifiable with high statistical confidence in five out of six satellite temperature datasets. Our results suggest that attribution studies with the changing seasonal cycle provide powerful evidence for a significant human effect on Earth’s climate.

Ben Santer is one of the more colourful climategate characters. He rose to fame after his email threat to beat the cr*p out of Pat Michaels was uncovered in the Climategate archive.

But there are plenty of other entertaining Santer emails. My personal favourite Santer climategate email is 1231257056.txt, in which he expresses outrage at having to release data and method to “scientific competitors”.

…

1. In my considered opinion, a very dangerous precedent is set if any derived quantity that we have calculated from primary data is subject to FOIA requests. At LLNL’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), we have devoted years of effort to the calculation of derived quantities from climate model output. These derived quantities include synthetic MSU temperatures, ocean heat content changes, and so-called “cloud simulator” products suitable for comparison with actual satellite-based estimates of cloud type, altitude, and frequency. The intellectual investment in such calculations is substantial.

2. Mr. Smith asserts that “there is no valid intellectual property justification for withholding this data”. I believe this argument is incorrect. The synthetic MSU temperatures used in our IJoC paper – and the other examples of derived datasets mentioned above – are integral components of both PCMDI’s ongoing research, and of proposals we have submitted to funding agencies (DOE, NOAA, and NASA). Can any competitor simply request such datasets via the U.S. FOIA, before we have completed full scientific analysis of these datasets?

The latest Santer effort is interesting in the context of other climate predictions. Remember back when climate alarmists were predicting warmer winters and shorter snow seasons? The most impressive effort of the “warmer winter” cycle of predictions, in my opinion, is Dr. Trenberth’s prediction of warmer, shorter winters AND more snow in midwinter.

Does global warming mean more or less snow?

Kevin Trenberth
January 30, 2015 9.43pm AEDT

…

Going forward, in mid winter, climate change means that snowfalls will increase because the atmosphere can hold 4% more moisture for every 1°F increase in temperature. So as long as it does not warm above freezing, the result is a greater dump of snow.

In contrast, at the beginning and end of winter, it warms enough that it is more likely to rain, so the total winter snowfall does not increase. Observations of snow cover for the northern hemisphere indeed show slight increases in mid-winter (December-February) but huge losses in the spring (see snow cover figure above.) This is all part of a trend to much heavier precipitation in the United States (see figure below), especially in the northeast.

Former NASA GISS director James Hansen went the other way with his scientific crystal ball, he produced a 2016 prediction of an imminent sharp drop in both Summer and Winter temperatures, followed by runaway warming.

… Global temperature becomes an unreliable diagnostic of planetary condition as the ice melt rate increases. Global energy imbalance (Fig. 15b) is a more meaningful measure of planetary status as well as an estimate of the climate forcing change required to stabilize climate. Our calculated present energy imbalance of ∼ 0.8 W m−2 (Fig. 15b) is larger than the observed 0.58 ± 0.15 W m−2 during 2005–2010 (Hansen et al., 2011). The discrepancy is likely accounted for by excessive ocean heat uptake at low latitudes in our model, a problem related to the model’s slow surface response time (Fig. 4) that may be caused by excessive small-scale ocean mixing.

Large scale regional cooling occurs in the North Atlantic and Southern oceans by mid-century (Fig. 16) for 10-year doubling of freshwater injection. A 20-year doubling places similar cooling near the end of this century, 40 years ear- lier than in our prior simulations (Fig. 7), as the factor of 4 increase in current freshwater from Antarctica is a 40-year advance.

Cumulative North Atlantic freshwater forcing in sverdrup years (Sv years) is 0.2 Sv years in 2014, 2.4 Sv years in 2050, and 3.4Sv years (its maximum) prior to 2060 (Fig. S14). The critical issue is whether human-spurred ice sheet mass loss can be approximated as an exponential process during the next few decades. Such nonlinear behavior depends upon amplifying feedbacks, which, indeed, our climate simulations reveal in the Southern Ocean. …

This article epitomizes the unhinged state of climate alarmism. At this point, it seems that it is flexible enough in its interpretation that it can be used as rationa’le to support any variety of spuriously illogical hypothesis.

This is a great theory, but it founders on the rocks of history. The term climate change was invented exactly because summers weren’t getting warmer (for 20 years). So it’s a bit rich to say the latest unvalidated computer program claims they will get warmer.

As far as winters getting colder; well, I remember the early days of these computer programs and they were so bad that they were all over the place. Hence the claim that if it was hotter, that was global warming and if it was colder, that was global warming too. Non-predictions like these give climate ‘scientists’ a bad name.

In a really quite small group of people you can be fairly sure that gossip spreads around quite effectively. You could argue that Santer ought to suspect that his expressed desire would eventually come to the ears of those he was talking about. As such, I think that constitutes a threat.

There is a vast difference between stating to a colleague that you are “Thinking” about “beating the cr*p” out of someone and actually telling your colleague you are going to the next time you see the person in question.
Since the exact quote was

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted. –Dr. Ben Santer, Climategate emails

It appears that it was still in the “Thinking About” category so not any Legal Threat but a definite potential threat.
If you were to make that statement to someone regarding the President, and it was made known to the Secret Service, you can bet they would be all over you in a heartbeat if the president were anywhere close to your location. So it would still be considered a threat in some cases.

I’m still trying to figure out why it took years and years for them to crunch some numbers. It’s not like they were going out and doing field work. They were just looking at already collected data, and apparently trying to figure out how to make it look as scary as possible. I guess I answered my own question.

They must be starting to worry about cooling or another plateau in global temperatures. Even after fudging (I mean correcting) the data, average global temperatures are not going up as fast as predicted. So now they’ve come up with a new twist to the plot that doesn’t require average yearly temperatures to go up at all. If winters are colder and summers are hotter, the average can stay about the same and still allow them to predict global catastrophe unless we make them our overlords and do what they say. Never mind that if we do what they say, it will bring on a greater catastrophe than CO2 could ever dream of causing.

They use what they call “S/N ratios” to determine their significance, not actual temperatures. Noise comes from the “pre-industrial control run, i.e. CO2 held at 280 ppm, the signal comes from HIST+RCP85 ensemble average for period 1979-2016.

The plots they show are for seasonal (they call it: annual cycle, AC) is a comparison of the AC from 3 different satellite data sets (RSS, STAR, UAH) and their melded “Climate Model Average”.

The Climate Model Average is data set joining between the CMIP5 “historical” runs (1979-2005) and the CMIP5 RCP8.5 ensemble average (2005 to 2016).

Satellite TMT data (A to F) and model TMT data (G and H) are described in Fig. 1. The stippling in (G) and (H) denotes grid points where the multimodel average trend in the annual mean or annual cycle exceeds the between-model standard deviation of the trend by at least a factor of 1.5. For the annual mean, tropical warming in UAH is noticeably reduced relative to RSS and STAR. Results are displayed on a common 5° × 5° latitude/longitude grid.

The right column of panels (the AC ones, that is B, D, F, and H) are the panels to concentrate on.
I will make two points here on these figures.

1. First note that the satellite observations (B,D,F) of deep red and darker blues all show much higher levels of variability (greater range) than the simulation (panel H, the HIST+RCP85). That tells us that there is a high level of variability in the observed seasonal signal, that is much higher than the seasonal signal of the simulation. That informs us that the simulation does a poor job of recreating the actual (observed) variability in seasonal climate. This problem is especially acute for RSS (panel B) compared to simulation (panel H). The model simulations are not capturing the actual range of AC variation.

2. The spatial coverage of the deeper red and blue shading the satellite observations does a poor job of matching the simulation, most especially the UAH and to the STAR as well. The best spatial fit of the Simulation is to the RSS panel. But even there the only good fit spatially, the RSS panel has the greatest AC data range (problem #1 above). And don’t even try to compare the areas outside of the mid-latitudal Northern Hemisphere (NH). It completely falls apart in most of the world, especially the Arctic where another AGW “finger print” is supposed to be the strongest.

Conclusion: Ben’s seasonal climate AGW “finger-print” only works in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude, but only just barely there. The simulation far underestimates the actual variability observed, which means the CMIP5 ensemble does a very poor job of recreating internal variability. And that “finger-print” completely falls apart outside that NH geographic band in the rest of the world. That is not much of a finger-print.

I’ll make one final point and my answer is conjecture.
The immediate question I have is “Why RCP8.5 simulations from CMIP5? And not the more reasonable RCP6.0 simulations?”

My conjecture is that if they used the reasonable RCP6.0 ensemble average to compare to the satellite records, then the internal seasonal variability problem is far worse.

Results are for the latest versions of the RSS, STAR, and UAH satellite datasets [(A to C), respectively] and for the multimodel average of the CMIP5 HIST+8.5 simulations (D). The plus symbols in (D) indicate multimodel average trends that exceed the between-model standard deviation of the zonal-mean monthly mean trend by at least a factor of 1.5. As in Fig. 3, all satellite and model temperature data were transformed to a common 5° × 5° latitude/longitude grid prior to zonal averaging.

This is true Wizard of Oz stuff. They need you to just ignore that solid red equatorial band, 20N to 20S, in the simulation (panel D) that is not there in the Satellite obs (panels A-C). This is the missing LTL hotspot problem, Ben’s other failed fingerprint. And Ben also only wants you to look at the June-July-August summer time match of the model to the same period in the satellite obs, but only in the NH 30N to 50N band. That is true Cherry picking the +results to get something to report.

Truly a hoot (and a lie) to call model prediction of seasonal variability a finger-print of CO2-AGW theory.

Are ANY of the points made in the paper supported by serious peer review? ie, what were the review questions asked and the responses to those questions? Until we get the answers to those questions we have to assume the quality of the paper is only as good as the chief author’s reputation – and that is not very good.

So winters get colder and summers hotter. Overall, no change, perhaps? Thats a switch from earlier model results saying that nights get warmer but not days. It seems that “climate science” surely is not settled. It offers something for everybody.

I understand the theory of CAGW ( Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming)-
Adding human sourced greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will warm the atmosphere,potentially disastrously.
However what exactly is the theory of Dangerous Anthropogenic Climate Change?
What are the indicia and consequences of such a theory?
Burning fossil fuels will cause “ climate disruption”?
How does one validate or invalidate such a theory?

The way to invalidate the current CAGW theory is to compare the predictions to that which is observed.

The Climate Alarmists are continually predicting one disaster after another, but we never see any of these disasters occurring. So you have to conclude the Climate Alarmist’s predictions are not consistent with reality.

I wonder if ole Ben just made it up like he did with AR4, when he claimed humans were definitely causing the climate to change in ways it wouldn’t do without human input, a claim not made by the scientists who worked on AR4. Ole Ben just added his opinion as if it were established fact. I don’t know how he still has any credibility after that little episode of truth distortion.

Jim Hansen usedhis 1988 paper with Sergej Lebedeff to pretty much define natural variability as the ±0.13°C jitter in global air temperature during his 1951-1980 normal period.

(1988) GRL 15(4) 323-326

“The standard deviation of annual-mean global-mean temperature about the 30-year mean is 0.13°C for the period 1951-1980. Thus the 1987 global temperature of 0.33°C, relative to the 1951-1980 climatology, is a warming of between 2-sigma and 3-sigma. If a warming of 3-sigma is reached, it will represent a trend significant at the 99% confidence level. However, causal connection of the warming with the greenhouse effect requires examination of the expected climate system response to a slowly evolving climate forcing, a subject beyond the scope of this paper.”

Compare that with his written 1988 testimony to the Senate Committee: “The standard deviation of 0.13°C is a typical amount by which the global temperature fluctuates annually about its 30-year mean; the probability of a chance warming of three standard deviations is about 1%. Thus we can state with about 99% confidence that current temperatures represent a real warming trend rather than a chance fluctuation over the 30 year period.”

Note that Hansen didn’t put any “±” next to his 0.13°C standard deviation. Nick Stokes would insist that’s evidence that Hansen meant to convey the 0.13°C as a strictly positive offset.

Pat,
Once again, to estimate the actual noise in the data, the 1951-1980 time-series should be de-trended and the SD calculated for that de-trended residual. Hansen’s behavior seems to epitomize Mark Twain’s remark that statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do.

The CAGW ho@x is about to face a catastrophic heart attack with cooler summers and colder winters when the PDO, AMO and NAO are all in their respective 30-year cool cycles from around 2021, and when the sun enters its weakest solar cycle since 1790 from 2021…

I can’t wait to see the excuses CAGW advocates come up with to explain falling global temps trends, with the disparity between CMIP5 global average warming model projections vs. reality exceeding 3~5 standard deviations..

Natural Super El Nino/strong El Nino events are major ploys CAGW advocates use to push the CAGW narrative, which they propagandize 24/7 when they occur, and then go silent when global cooling occurs during La Nina events…

You’re correct that these natural events should not drive the science, but since when has CAGW been about science???

I think Ben has just proved that he hasn’t read historical weather records of even just 200 years ago. He is obviously not mathematically equipped to recognize patterns since he has not recognized weather patterns that are associated with long periods of low sunspot activity.

When I was at school guys before they got caned used to line many sheets of newspaper inside their trousers. Maybe this figuratively what Ben is doing – papering his ass before he eventually gets caned for all of his lying.

Eric,
Despite what you claim the study does not state that climate change will make “winters colder and summers warmer.” Even Fox News is able to correctly summarise the paper as saying that “summers are warming more rapidly than the other seasons” so in other words both winters and summers are getting warmer but the rate of increase in summer is larger.

Richard,
I have no idea what you think those RSS numbers are showing. But they would appear to
suggest that 1980 the average summer temperature was 14.5C and in 2018 the average temperature so far is 14.8 giving a rise of 0.3C so it would appear to show that summers are getting warmer.

What specifically do you believe about it, and I stress the word believe. What is it about CO2, the climate, and man’s role that you specifically believe?
Please be as specific, but direct as possible.

It also suggests the 2001 average summer temperature was 14.8 C and in 2018 so far it is 14.8C giving a rise/fall of 0.0 C so it would appear to show that for the 21st century (so far) summers have been static (dare I say “paused”), getting neither colder nor warmer.

Percy,
It is true that since about 1985 the T-max temperatures have been increasing more rapidly than the T-min temperatures (according to the BEST land temp data). However, that creates a problem for alarmists because the theory behind AGW is that nights and Winters should be showing more warming (actually less cooling) than days and Summers. That is exactly what my Figure 1 above shows, up until about 1985. What is needed is an explanation as to why the warming pattern doesn’t agree with theory, and what happened about 1985.

Percy,
You need to read the paper. It shows that models predict that summers will warmer faster
than winters and then tries and succeeds to find evidence for this in recent satellite data sets. So the theory predicts exactly what has been observed in the observations.

Santer wanted a result that was more alarming than the earth moderating its temperatures. He look and found it, apparently. When you’re motivated to find a result like that, it destroys credibility.

…like he had any to begin with. Santer is responsible for the massive own goal that dismissed the GCMs by suggesting it was highly unlikely the earth could make 17 years of no warming because that’s what the models allowed for. Unfortunately for him a few years later mother nature did just that.

Climate change of this nature will have little to with CO2.
What can cause this type of climate change is semi-permanent area’s of high pressure sitting over northern land masses. Because while during the summer this type of patterning will become “heat domes”. Once we move into the winter they soon turn into freezers.

Taken in context, it seems to me that “climate change” could, at any point in time, have one of the four possible gradient combinations:
1) Making winters colder and summers hotter,
2) Making winters hotter and summers hotter,
3) Making winters hotter and summers colder, or
4) Making winters colder and summers colder.

Should I therefore be alarmed that one of the 25% equal-probability* states has happened? Even if it is true?

* Based on climate history reconstructions over the last 1 billion years.

Santer warmer summers colder winters – hey what are you going to say when temperatures have stopped going up for about as long as the warming scare itself? And Hansen’s ‘global temperatures are not a useful metric’ is a response to the same stalled temperatures. They see the frightening cooling oceans. They realize that they have shot most of their bolts adjusting the data and now they have to show that temperature rise isn’t necessary to show …err… global warming.

Whatever happens next is always climate change responsible for A,B,C,D? It doesn’t matter if A,B,C or D goes up, goes down or stays the same. There is no science involved here at all other that blaming everything that happens on a religion that doesn’t distinguish anything from natural climate.

When a succession of milder winters and cooler summers happen in future, this will still be blamed on climate change.

No, climate change is not responsible for this because between the 1970’s and 2000’s while global temperatures were significantly warming (normally expected). The summers were getting warmer mainly due to minimum temperatures being less cool and especially winters milder because of minimum temperatures being significantly less cold. This century the pattern has changed more and more cooler summers and colder winters have occurred between the occasional hot summers and more usual milder winters.

What has changed? Increasing CO2? No, this has been occurring for decades before. Lower solar activity changes the jet stream into more meridional longer duration pattern, increased global cloud levels and reduced solar insolation to the surface. This resulted in more energy loss to space and the pause/hiatus that happened for much of this century.

Increasing blocking patterns have occurred with meridional jet stream that causes stubborn high pressure omega blocks that keeps weather patterns around the world stuck for longer periods. That means cooler/wetter regions persist for longer and hotter/drier regions persist for longer. Blocking patterns normally lead to lower minimums in summer and lower minimums in winter, depending on whether land or ocean source. The ocean source is usually more favourable with a zonal jet stream.

Previously between the 1970’s and 2000’s the jet stream was increasingly becoming zonal making worlds weather less severe. Now after these blocks start appearing more frequent again, they are blamed on climate change when there are a result of an opposite change to what was originally blamed on for most of last century.

True, thanks to the awful terminology ‘climate change’ only weather patterns determines climate, not the other way round.

When the background signals change any influence on weather patterns will be indicated as climate over the long term in the future. The alarmist use of climate change is awful terminology anyway when they use it only meaning AGW. It can easily be referred to any climate change natural, environmental or CO2 and brings up a strawman type argument.

Cooling planet, warming planet, changing water vapor and clouds etc can change weather over the long term and therefore ultimately climate.

According to p. 9 of the DOE Public Access Plan (available on the internet):

“DMPs [Data Managtement Plans] should provide a plan for making all research data displayed in publications resulting from the proposed research open, machine-readable, and digitally accessible to the public at the time of publication. This includes data that are displayed in charts, figures, images, etc. In addition, the underlying digital research data used to generate the displayed data should be made as accessible as possible to the public in accordance with the principles stated above. The published article should indicate how these data can be accessed. Individual research offices will encourage researchers to deposit data in existing community or institutional repositories or to submit these data to the article publisher as supplemental information.”

I could not find the regulation just now, but when I was last intimately familiar with LLNL policies, I remember being told that on a request from a public or business entity, LLNL must provide data (and even computer code) unless a national security, privacy or private business proprietary exception could be claimed. This was particularly onerous when the request was for computer code because it required some documentation of the code to be provided, which often was not intended for public or non-expert use.

As they should be, if they are the product of federally funded research. The issue in the article was the claim made (apparently – I don’t follow these issues closely enough to know if the quoted statements by Mr. Santer are accurate) that “primary data” should not be available and the notion that release of research data hurts their competitive capabilities. The DOE policy on data release is as stated, that everything should be released that is not excluded by national security considerations (i.e. nuclear weapon type information), privacy issues, or connection to proprietary information of businesses provided to the government for some reason. As far as competitiveness, the Economy Act (31 USC 1525) prohibits federal labs from competition with the private sector, unless the private sector simply cannot do the work. It dictates that work should be done by the private sector (i.e. commercial firms, universities, etc) unless the unique capabilities of the federal lab are such that only the federal lab can do the work cheaply and efficiently. Federal labs are rarely cheaper than the private sector for any effort.

As an environmental consultant for over a decade, I wrote hundreds of reports for clients. I have also read hundreds of scientific papers and have better than average reading comprehension. But I can’t even get through the abstract of this twisted word pretzel. It’s borderline incomprehensible. I know that if you’re not a climatologist, you’re not qualified (or smart enough) to understand their sophisticated brand of science, but if I had written anything as obfuscating and confusing as this paper, I would have been fired.

Brings to mind the old saying: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with Bullshit.”

Everybody help me remember, please.
There was a huge issue with one of the IPCC reports, SAR (second, 1995) if I recall.
The intro to the “Scientific Basis” Chapter 8, contained
“None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”
and
“When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, `We do not know. “‘

The text was duly peer-reviewed and agreed upon. Then at the last minute Santer deleted the above lines and inserted the text below:

“The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate.”

This, of course, changed everything and turned things right on their head.
So it seems Santer has been banging on about the “human fingerprint” for quite some time.

Many did. Something like 400 IIRC. It was at that point that the composition of the IPCC changed from mostly top scientists to mostly those who needed the publicity and footnotes in their CV’s.

The incompetence of the IPCC leadership and the bias exerted by the lead authors undermined the authority of their products that many ‘serious scientists’ no longer wanted to be associated with them.

These ad hoc ‘revisions’ also plague the ISO standard writing process. One can find text, objectionable to the experts and repeatedly refused, included in a final product “because it is needed”, according to the Convenors, meaning, they have a plan up their sleeve that is not viable without the expert-rejected text. Sound familiar?

Yet another WTFIUWWUWT violent distortion of a serious, high quality, peer-reviewed, thorough, scientific paper. This blog has devolved from its ignominious start to the level of the Infowars blog. No sense of shame by Anthony Watts the editor. This blog has become merely tabloid trash. I give up.

From the article:
[ The synthetic MSU temperatures used in our IJoC paper – and the other examples of derived datasets mentioned above – are integral components of both PCMDI’s ongoing research, and of proposals we have submitted to funding agencies (DOE, NOAA, and NASA). ]

‘Synthetic’ temperatures and ‘derived’ datasets are integral components of serious, high quality research?

There is no doubt in my mind that winters were colder and summers hotter ( and drier ) in the 1970’s than they are now. But when you tie that to CO2 increases, as opposed to natural patterns of temperature change, that’s something else entirely. Springs on our 100 acres, fed by rainfall and marshes, are a good indicator of average rainfall, and they were always near dry by the end of summer. But not in the last 30 years or so. Not until now.

Climate predictions reminds me of predictions of bitcoin price. When it is rising there is joy joy joy and when it is falling there is doom doom doom but it always seems to oscillate around a not very changing yet slowly rising central point.

Also, I note the graph begins in the 1870s.
Whilst I am sure the meteorologists of those days tried very hard to get accurate readings, I suspect – without a n y research – that there were fewer sites observing in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century than there were in – say – 1970.
By eye – there was more (shorter term) variability then, which might be related. Or not.

Jeff,
The takeaway here is that what Santer is claiming only seems to be happening since about 1985, yet the claim is that AGW has been happening since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. That is, the recent change is not typical of the warming episode, and does not fit the hypothesis of what is causing warming. Santer is not supported by the historical data, and there is no explanation forthcoming from alarmists.

All just words trying to sound sciency. Like advertising of the early 90’s used the sell-all word “total” and until recently used “clinically proven”, today “technology” is the advertising buzzword and implies any argument against their position is futile because “..even our janitors wear white coats”.

Likewise, “evidence” isn’t proof, and certainly not if predicted by a model that outputs whatever’s input. It’s just a mirror. Even less so again by using the weasel-word “suggest”.

This “study” is yet another fund-grab to produce little if anything but destructive propaganda and there’s a high statistical confidence that they’ll be allowed to continue doing this.

“Mr. Madison, what you just said is the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone is this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

I guess they’ve given up on the tropical tropospheric hotspot as the finger-print of CO2 AGW. Apparently now a “heartbeat” of colder and hotter due to TheMagicMolecule. Can’t be wrong about that since climate is always naturally changing.

Ben Santer could not be more wrong. He has it exactly backward. Greenhouse gases deposit more heat to cold regions than they do to warm regions. This is true if the difference in temperatures is due to time (night vs day, or summer vs winter) or due to geography (tropic vs mid-latitudes vs sub-polar regions). The Modtran computer code affords an easy verification. The same addition of GHGs applied to sub-arctic summer compared to sub-arctic winter shows greater temperature increase in the winter.

One can also check out Joe Bastardi’s writings on this matter. He notes that it is harder to add heat to a warm substance than to a cool substance.

For GHG absorption it may be considered that such an energy boost to single molecule is transfered to the surrounding molecules by heat transfer: molecular collision (normal conduction) or by re-radiation. In the conduction case the amount of heat transferred is proportional to temperature difference and in the re-radiation case to the 4th power of temperature difference. Cool substances have greater temperature differences than the warm ones.

“There is an interesting exception that doesn’t show this pattern: the University of Alabama at Huntsville dataset, which is run by Roy Spencer and John Christy (two of the small handful of vocal contrarian scientists who reject or downplay human-caused climate change). That dataset looks totally different in the Antarctic. ”

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha I was right. I did some further digging . Check the website above where the comment came from. THIS MEANS THAT THE WHOLE STUDY IS BOGUS. It is behind a paywall and looks like it will stay behind a paywall. Doesnt matter. It is bogus because the other 5 temperature data sets are bogus. The only temperature dataset that both sides trust is UAH and that is where the global warming battle will be fought from now on.

Santer et al…. will never quit trying until their funding gets cut off. Don’t they realize that they can’t keep this hoax going on much longer? The climate will rear its ugly cold head and it will be soon (all indications 3 years max) be all over. However another big downside(other than increased inflation because of carbon taxes) to this is; we have to keep fending off these bogus studies and claims for another 3 years. How tedious; but sometimes its fun to laugh at the claims.

“In this new study, scientists examined seasonal temperature cycles in the troposphere and observed the profound impact humans are having on the atmosphere and our seasons.”

Even if they observed actual changes in the seasonal temperature cycles, how do they conclude that the impact is “profound,” let alone that humans are the cause? Have they observed the changes long enough to rule out the possibility of a natural multiyear cycle? Or are they just letting their biases draw their conclusions for them?

So the forecast of 5 to 9 (two already formed and disintegrated, not counting that one that went north to my kingdom) is not going to happen this year?
I wonder how that will affect winter snows/storms, and next year’s crop season. Hmmm….

never say never.
Hurricanes are complex and have multiple factors in their genesis.
I certainly hope there are no strong storms this year, but we are at the very early start of the serious part of the season.

He added the attribution statement to the Second AR in 1995 SPM after the other authors had already left town (Madrid). Quite unethical.
Santer is a proven, unethical computer hacker. Nothing more.

He lives on rent-seeking climate modelism at DOE LLNL. For his paycheck, he looks for “finger-prints” of CO2 climate change, always finding something new to grasp on to. His CC “fingerprints,” that with the passage of time and deep scrutiny, evaporate like the morning dew in under the sun. He moves ever on to find more ethereal fingerprints.

Jeff,
Perhaps, if virtual baldness is considered, and the use of unicorn droppings, plastered to the mentioned skulls for a month or so – with a result, in their dreams, of heads of hair like the Beatles . . . .

Has anybody here an idea what LLNL is about? Ever had a retina scanned there? Well, secrecy is the motto. Just nearby Sandia Labs, even more secret. Why – nuclear fusion, high temps., minimum 100 million K. All that code developed for plasma, mhd, cfd put to climate use on their grid. The reaction is no wonder.

I really am seriously worried that code does not work for fusion either. Now that would be a national embarrasment. Without bomb testing NIF (laser national ignition facility) is critical to test the code. Maybe they are fed up with simulation garbage? Maybe mhd plasma self-organization has them blindsided – now cimate also? The baggage that creeps in with the maths – remember Einstein’s rejoinder :
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

LLNL NIF has no visitor area anymore. Fusion is being badly downgraded – even Trump is doing nothing about it. There’s the famous story of visiting Soviet physicists telling US counterparts their fusion program was based on Riemann was classified afterwards and no US physicist alowed to discuss it! Secrecy on steroids.
Exactly Bertrand Russell’s objective – secrecy to destroy scientific progress.

Laser-induced fusion is a dead end for net power production.
The only thing that the NIF can do now is test some aspects of fission/fusion under aging bomb material conditions to verify the US nuke stockpile will do what it was originally designed and manufactured to do. This is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s StockPile Stewardship Program.https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/experimental-highlights#energy_record

Nukes of course have high security requirements. There is also likely a TS effort underway to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons. Think: smaller, less fission mass, more fusion bang for the buck. Making, purifying new plutonium has become a proliferation taboo, so we’ll probably have to do with what we have for a long time.

The only hope (for now) on fusion is the magnetic confinement approach being developed at ITER’s Cadarache, France facility.

“The ITER facility is expected to finish its construction phase in 2025 and will start commissioning the reactor that same year. Initial plasma experiments are scheduled to begin in 2025, with full deuterium–tritium fusion experiments starting in 2035.”
(from Wikipedia)

“Remember back when climate alarmists were predicting warmer winters and shorter snow seasons?”

Ummm…. yes, and it went exactly the opposite way in my kingdom. I keep taking photos of those early and late snowfalls, noting the dates, the temps, the humidity levels – everything you’re supposed to to do keep some kind of records, and they all stomp his claims flat.

Mr. Santers and his ilk will never listen to facts. They are addicted to those charts they cook up out of whole cloth, because those ‘prove’ that they are right, even when they are wrong. And they act like this planet is an object the size of a pea, but that refers to their (blatant insults here). Compared to Jupiter, yes, Earth is quite small. Their concept of how such a dynamic system works is badly flawed by a complete lack of respect for it.

In the heat of summer, one of the hottest in living (if not historical) memory the wind did what, exactly, when the temperature rose? It stopped of course!

So is this a detectable fingerprint of human-induced changes in the weather system outside natural variation?

Wasn’t it this same Mr S who says storms and winds will increase when the temperature increases “because climate change”? Yeah…I thought so.

This windless summer heat is consistent with Hansen’s prediction of sudden cooling, and Trenberth’s warming, and Santer’s storminess and Mann’s hockey stick, and Gavin’s garter adjustments made when his (temperature) slip started showing.

How can we be sure that the person in the photo above is not Borat in a blue tie disguise, about to reveal that this whole CC thing is just another elaborate, sick joke made in bad taste?

This time in the summer of 1936 in Oklahoma we had had about 30 days of above 100F temperatues, and would get another 35 days over 100F before the summer was over (65 days total, with about 30 days of that in a row over 100F).

We have had two days over 100F this year and it’s 88F outside right now and we just had rain (we hardly every have rain in July in Oklahoma).

Quite a contrast, wouldn’t you say?

Which year was more extreme 1936 or 2018? It’s not even close. And we should keep in mind that 1936 wasn’t the only hot year in that decade, all the years in the 1930’s were very hot. We haven’t had a hot decade like that since. The decades of the Twenty-First Century don’t even come close.

Probably we should expect some local/regional variation in warming rates, though. Looking at the broader picture should show a warming trend if the theory is right. According to UAH satellite, air over land regions of the northern hemisphere warmed at a rate of +0.15C per decade during summer (June, July August) between 1979 and 2017. That’s a total warming of about 0.6C for NH summers since 1979. So if it hasn’t warmed particularly in summer where you are, it must have warmed more elsewhere: https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt

“Global energy imbalance is a more meaningful measure of planetary status as well as an estimate of the climate forcing change required to stabilize climate.”
Yes, for when actual temperatures aren’t cooperating. Makes it easier to claim the following:
“The discrepancy is likely accounted for by excessive ocean heat uptake at low latitudes in our model, a problem related to the model’s slow surface response time (Fig. 4) that may be caused by excessive small-scale ocean mixing.
”
How convenient. The “heat is hiding in the oceans.”
These people have no shame.

Santer is defining “signals” again. And, of course, this paper is pay-walled. This drives me nuts.

I’ll have to fall back on the old arguments, again. It’s still a logical fallacy to define a correlation as causal, What is this new “novel” signal detection mechanism? What patterns in normal variability are proven to happen ONLY when humans add CO2? How exactly, does Santer subtly tease out the human attribution signal, which I hear can be very hard to detect and prove?

I wanted to read about how all his new, NOVEL ideas have been published and discussed and have held up under many attempts to falsify them. But of course, I can’t, because it hasn’t, and although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, this appears to be another case of a logical fallacy (post hoc ergo prompter hoc) married to a bald assertion (Eureka, I found it) married to a tendentious CO2-presuming climate model by one of the high priests of CAGW.

If someone with access could please post a link to the full paper, that would be great. I assume taxpayers funded this, and so we’re entitled to read the thing for free, or under fair-use terms as a news or educational item.

If I ever met a Ben Santer paper in a dark alley, I’d like to smash it’s premise right in the kisser (that last part is a joke, ah say a joke, son – Foghorn Leghorn).

When Santer refers to “synthetic” temperatures, does “synthetic” have the same meaning as imaginary, false, fictional, mendacious? Is he saying the outputs from his precious climate models are as good a representation of real world climatology as cheese wiz is a representation of French Brie?

Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! –no, no! They heard! –they suspected! –they knew! –they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now –again! –hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –see the clouds go diddley-doo! The vortex goes doodely-dum! The oceans eddy and gyre! and here– here! It is the beating of the hideous seasonal climate heart!”

The argument that mid-winter snowfall ( does that mean Dec.21st?) will be heavier because warmer air holds more moisture is just plain stupid. Warmer air is also that much further from it’s condensation and freezing points. By this logic, mid July should see the highest snowfall of the entire year!
How stupid are we supposed to be, to accept this crap at face value?

Even Stokes and Moshe arent going to come here to shill for this BS. Planetary temperatures are not a suitable metric indeed. Its colder in some wintry places and hotter in other summery places – definitely a powerful signal of misanthropic global warming. If we dont clean up our act fast, wintery pla es will get even colder and summery places even hotter.

Clearly something like this explains a looming crisis of global warming with rapidly cooling oceans. Theyve been quiet about dropping ocean temperatures until now, likely praying for it to stop. Didnt Maxwell Smart hedge his bets with “Would ypu believe…”

The IPCC of course has been saying for decades now that we would have more cloud cover due to increased evaporation rates and warmer air being able to hold more water vapour. But the recent heatwaves have been associated with high pressure and very low levels of cloud cover in the affected areas.

What I am wondering is whether what is really going on at the moment in terms of a number of heatwaves preceded by an extremely cold winter in many parts of the Northern hemisphere is actually due to the current very low level of sun spot activity: see http://www.spaceweather.com/.

There are a number of known mechanisms for such an effect including changes in the amount of UV during the solar cycle ( Haigh, J. D; Winning, A. R; Toumi, R; Harder, J. W (October 6, 2010). “An influence of solar spectral variations on radiative forcing of climate”. Nature. 467 (7316): 696–9.) which affects the heating of the upper atmosphere and also the variation in the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth associated with solar cycles (see cosmic rays in the atmosphere at http://www.spaceweather.com/).

There was very low sunspot activity in the famous (at any rate in the UK) summer of 1976: see http://writings.basiliochen.com/?p=840. It is also known that a number of summers during the Maunder Minimum were very hot at least in England.

The above hypothesis at least provides a set of easily falsifiable set of predictions unlike AGW theory which many readers will appreciate seems to be able in the hands of its proponents to explain and predict warming, cooling, flood, drought, indeed any newsworthy weather event – at least after the event.

Wow, so after 30 years: “We provide scientific evidence that a human-caused signal in the seasonal cycle of tropospheric temperature has emerged from the background noise of natural variability.” But is that the only signal? And is it bad?

Yeah, more heat input DEFINITELY makes for both hotter and colder temperatures. I notice this in the winter when I’m heating my cream of wheat for breakfast. Not only do portions of the cream of wheat start to boil in some sections of the pan, but ice forms in other sections. (sarc)

Even if it is warming sooner that is *not* necessarily a bad thing. More snow in the winter means more moisture in the ground to fuel early food growth. Those growing winter wheat in the central US will welcome this! Warming earlier means a longer growing season which will also increase food production. This is even more providential if the warm temperatures during summer are moderating as current observations show since temperatures above 95degF can inhibit plant growth.

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